But the profilers might be wrong.
And the profilers couldn’t tell you anything—right or wrong—were it not for their mental database of previous serial killers. That’s why no one caught Jack the Ripper. He left plenty of clues, but no one knew what they meant at the time. The whole deal was just too new. No one had the experience that would allow them to apply their intuition in the right direction. You have to reduce possibility to a reasonable number before insight can take hold.
Just by examining the crimes, the Riverside Prostitute Killer seemed an easy profile to make. You start with the obvious: This guy keeps getting away with picking up victims in the same small area, so he must be a guy who blends in and seems nonthreatening or acts authoritative. Since he’s careful, meticulous, and organized, clever to cover his tracks, he’s probably a guy who holds down a job and acts normal around his peers. He probably has a girlfriend or wife. And some stressor in his life—some problem at home or work—has exacerbated his rage and urge to kill. Next, as with virtually all serial killers, he has an abandoning father and a confused love/rejection relationship with his mother. From the git-go, this guy couldn’t win.
You want more detail? He’ll be a white male, mid- to late thirties, slightly overweight, slightly under average height, and no Mark Harmon. Why? Because that’s what the statistics say.
But stop for a moment. Stop and look at this profile. It describes an everyman. It describes someone who is absolutely normal and whose life appears normal and extremely average… except for those moments when he kills. So how does this profile help you catch your killer?
It doesn’t. In fact, it tells you that this guy is going to get away with murder after murder unless you just plain get lucky and happen to be in the right place at the right time to catch him.
That is, unless you try to manipulate him. Unless you put out the word of how you see him, and hope that he hears it and reacts to it in a way that reveals more about himself.
Hence, the Cathy McDonald debacle, which, as I say, none of the authorities will cop to.
But D.A. Zellerbach did recently admit to me that Bill Suff surprisingly did not fit the profile he and the task force had been working from. Nonetheless, Zellerbach tried to get that profile admitted at trial, and back then he was prepared to say that it fit Bill to a T.
According to Zellerbach today, where the profile went wrong was in describing the killer as a man certain to be overtly aggressive and threatening, particularly when cornered. He should have been a dominating presence, something more on the order of John Wayne Gacy, or that Glen Edward Rogers character, the accused but as yet untried cross-country serial killer, whom I find scary to look at even in pictures. A blue collar Mr, Hyde.
The profilers were basing this conclusion on the mutilations, the rage, the clear and deep hatred of women which was being expressed. This had to be a man who had to grit his teeth in order to pretend to be calm between kills. This guy had to work out on the heavy bag, mountain bike, raise barns, or do something strenuous to blow off steam each and every day.
But Bill Suff was a weenie. A wimp, a whiner. When Zellerbach first saw him in custody, he almost thought they had the wrong man, “He was just such a crybaby,” says Zellerbach, “He was not what we expected,”
Zellerbach and the profilers had expected a man. What they got was a child.
The profile said that the killer did not know his victims prior to killing them. He would pull up, strike his deal, drive away with the girl, and kill her. She was an object, her killing was impersonal, when he was mangling her he was seeing someone else in his mind’s eye.
Wrong.
In fact, Bill killed prostitutes that he had “dated”. He regularly slept with the same girls. And, in the case of Kimberly Lyttle, he fell for her and decided he could rescue her and her child from a life of drugs and sex-for-hire. He told himself that he loved her. He offered her money not to have sex for money, not to have sex with him or with other men. And then, on her birthday in June of 1989, he made the grandest gesture: Bill asked Kim to move in with him.
Her response was rather less than he’d expected. Kim rejected Bill’s offer, preferring to live on her own, wanting to keep her relationship with him “at arm’s length”, business and nothing more.
So that’s when she had to die.
It’s pretty damn insulting when you can’t even pay a woman to quit being a hooker, when you want nothing from her but to allow you to help her. That’s the very definition of rejection.
It’s also the definition of control. What he was really trying to do was to control her, to own her, and she was too strong a person to go along with that. So she died.
To be noted is that she was the first of the series for which he has been convicted. There are other bodies that predate Kim, but not enough evidence against Bill, even though the police closed the cases upon his death sentence. Granting Bill his overdue presumption of innocence on those cases, we can say that Kim’s rejection of him was the final straw. If he couldn’t control this hooker, then he could hardly be expected to control himself—he became a killing machine. I know that some of the women in Bill’s life—from first wife Teryl to Riverside girlfriend Bonnie—all want to believe that their rejection is what pushed Bill over the edge, but if anyone is entitled to take that dubious bow, it’s Kim.
Love—or seeming love—becomes murder.
That’s the equation that, at a gut level, we all “get”, even though none of us—average Jills and Joes, profilers, psychologists, and cops alike—none of us can never quite really understand it. We know it can happen, but we just wouldn’t do it. We know that men have a natural tendency toward wanting to take care of and control women, but how really does that simple, endearing insecurity turn into madness, obsession, and murder?
Early on, I went out to interview hookers for this book. Insight into their minds might give insight into their relationships might make sense of the death equation. Plus, I wanted to hang with hookers. My ostensible purpose was to ask these women how come hookers kept getting into a van with a serial killer. The question turned out to answer itself: because what hookers do for a living is get into vans with guys. If you work at the post office, you go to the post office. If a serial killer turns out to be driving the van, you lose. And if the letter carrier is pissed because he didn’t get credit for all his overtime, then you lose there, too. You can get yourself killed anywhere. Probably will.
Anyway, when I was making the rounds of the hookers, I came across a guy I remembered as a crew person at MTM Studios back when I was writing for Remington Steele.
The guy is now a pornographer and a pimp. And he’s loaded with money. He lives in a strange substrata world where he is at once overt and yet unknown. His Hollywood Hills house appears normal from the outside, but inside it’s a dungeon. Pillories and whips and chains and enema bags, and all that stuff. A beautiful, raven haired UCLA medical student works for him, available at an hourly rate for customers who want their scrotums professionally slashed with razor blades. Of course, you first have to sign a release and waiver drawn up by the pimp’s high priced Westside lawyer.
If big toys are your thing, the pimp’s got a yacht which you can hire, and he’ll stock it with anything you want, living or dead, chemically active or inert, just so long as it all takes place in international waters. No questions are asked upon your return to the dock, and the cleanup crew is exceedingly thorough.